Mobile

ARKit is one of the biggest changes in iOS 11. Under the hood, Apple is about to transform the iPhone into a very capable augmented reality device. Felix Lapalme‏ has been looking at assets in the Maps app package to find out if the company is going to leverage augmented reality for turn-by-turn directions. On

Roughly 1 in 30 Facebook users tells someone Happy Birthday each day, showing Facebook’s first major emergent behavior is still going strong. Now Facebook is equipping the 45 million people sending birthday wishes each day with some new features. Now instead of just posting a soulless “HBD” or “Happy Birthday!” on someone’s wall with no

Facebook is again getting into the daily deals space, this time in collaboration with eBay. The company has launched a new feature within its Marketplace section on its mobile app, where a selection of inventory from eBay’s Daily Deals program is now available. The deals can be shopped directly in Facebook’s app, but checkout takes

Despite the tepid reception for Facebook Stories, the social network is doubling down on its full-screen Camera feature. Today Facebook added the ability to go Live, shoot two-second GIFs and share full-screen text posts on colored background from Facebook Camera, which lets you share to Facebook Stories, Direct messaging and the traditional News Feed. The

Push notifications are one of the main ways we connect with our apps — but according to OneSignal CEO George Deglin, most of the tools for managing those notifications are too expensive without offering the features that developers need. Deglin’s company started out as a Y Combinator-backed mobile developer called Hiptic Games. It was as

GoDaddy may be best known for its web domain registry (a business that’s been in the headlines recently), but it’s also moving into the voice and telephone business, starting with last year’s acquisition of FreedomVoice. Today the company is launching a new app called SmartLine, aimed at addressing a basic need of small businesses —

Snapchat’s got a new trick to stay one step ahead of Instagram by turning everyone’s quick video clips from concerts into a much more watchable music video you control. Snapchat “Crowd Surf” uses artificial intelligence machine learning technology to analyze when lots of people are all recording the same musical performance at the same time.

Only a few years ago, Opera Max was the rising star in the browser maker’s portfolio. The service offered a system-wide data-saving proxy that funnelled all app data through Opera’s servers to compress images and videos. Now, however, Max is heading for the deadpool. The company, which is now owned by a consortium of Chinese

Google today is expanding its speech recognition capabilities to support dozens of new languages, particularly those in emerging markets in India and Africa, the company announced this morning. That means more people around the world will gain the ability to search the web by voice as well as type via voice using Google’s keyboard app,

Snap’s Spectacles sunglasses may prove to be more of a fad than a must-have device. Snap revealed during its call following weak Q2 earnings that it generated $5.4 million in “Other” revenue, which would equate to around 41,500 pairs of its Spectacles camera sunglasses at a $130 price point. That’s compared to $8.3 million in

SoundCloud will soon collapse if investors don’t vote for a rescue funding round tomorrow. The stumbling music streaming community site had to suddenly lay off 40 percent of its staff last month. Now it’s asking investors for $169.5 million at a pre-money enterprise valuation of just $150 million, according to Axios‘ reliable business editor Dan

Things are not going so well for Blue Apron this morning after reporting its second-quarter earnings (its first earnings report ever), and the stock is crashing as a result of it. The company’s stock is down more than 14 percent on the earnings report, which came in pretty mixed compared to what Wall Street wanted.

Uber is starting to roll out a new in-app chat feature globally today, which will allow riders to send text messages directly to their driver once they book a ride, and vice versa. The new feature replaces the somewhat clunky mechanism of SMS for text communication between rider and driver, helping to preserve privacy for

Facebook has a new home for original video content produced exclusively for it by partners, who will earn 55 percent of ad break revenue while Facebook keeps 45 percent. The “Watch” tab and several dozen original shows will start rolling out to a small group of U.S. users tomorrow on mobile, desktop and Facebook’s TV

Curbside, a startup powering same-day shopping experiences for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, including CVS, is today announcing a new partnership with Yelp that will allow consumers to shop in Yelp’s app, then pick up their items locally. For shoppers, the idea is that they’ll be able to browse area businesses’ products and promotions in Yelp, then

“Cloaking” sounds sci-fi, but it’s actually a trick used today by spammers to show content moderators or search engine spiders an innocent-looking version of their site while real visitors just see ads and scams. For example, some spammers try to fool Facebook’s review team and tech by showing any of its staffers’ IP addresses a

The EFF has filed a court filing pressing for warrants be required for searches of mobile phones, laptops and other digital devices by federal agents at international airports and U.S. land borders — describing these as “highly intrusive forays into travelers’ private information”. It’s urging that searches of digital devices should only be possible when

Apple just dropped a brand new beta for your favorite iOS update of the year. While iOS 11 isn’t coming out until September, the company has been testing the new version for a couple of months already. I still don’t recommend installing the beta on a device you use every day, unless you’re willing to

In the days before electronic music, musicians used to have to play things called “guitars.” There are very few players left among us with the skills necessary to play this seemingly lost instrument but programmer Chris Ladd hopes to resurrect the so-called “git-fiddle” with modern technology. Ladd, a former programmer for the New York Times,

The potential of mobile augmented reality is clear. Last summer Pokemon Go gave a glimpse of just how big this craze could be, as thousands of excited humans converged on parks, bus stops and other locations around the world to chase virtual monsters through the lens of their smartphones. Apple was also watching. And this

Calling for room service is kind of annoying, though it’s one of the most first world-type of problems one could have. But that’s just to say the hotel industry is behind, technologically speaking. Startup AavGo is trying to fix that by bringing iPads into hotels to enable hotel staff to communicate among themselves, as well

Apple is reportedly working on an Apple Watch that won’t have to be tethered to your phone for data, freeing that small fitness tracker on your wrist from the oppressive confines of having to carry around a now-critical piece of technology for operating in your daily life. This will probably have repercussions for the battery

Snap will report its second earnings report this week, which will once again look to answer the question: is there room on the advertising spectrum for Snap? The answer during its last earnings report (its first as a public company) was a resounding to be determined. The company’s stock has been hammered in the past

Apple reported its earnings this week, and with a surprisingly positive report the shares spiked again as Apple signaled a potential huge iPhone release. With that jump, Apple’s market cap is now over $800 billion. This year alone, shares of Apple are up almost 35%. If Apple’s promise plays out — or exceeds — what

Stories taught us the joy of dictating the pace of content consumption. We fast-forward in 10-second increments, with a quick trigger finger let loose the moment we get bored. That’s why soon, endless paragraphs of text and time-consuming videos might not be the only ways to get our news. This week, signs were revealed suggesting

As Dropbox slowly gears up toward its initial public offering, it’s bringing on a longtime enterprise executive — Quentin Clark, a former VP of Microsoft as well as SAP CTO — as head of its very-long-title-where-he-will-oversee-a-ton-of-things. His official title is going to be SVP of Engineering, Product and Design, where he will oversee all of

Snap Inc desperately needs ad revenue to redirect its sinking share price. So after a year of getting mercilessly copied by Facebook, Snapchat is returning the favor by launching its take on the Facebook ads Power Editor. This new “Advanced Mode” for its Snapchat Ads Manager lets big advertisers rapidly deploy complex ad campaigns with

Two huge pieces of news today from Yelp, the company that shows up first in your Google search for a restaurant: first, GrubHub is acquiring food delivery service Eat24 from the company in a big partnership for $287.5 million; second, the company reported its second-quarter earnings… and they look pretty good. Let’s tackle the first

Google today announced it’s rolling out a change to its Play Store so that better-performing apps – meaning those that experience fewer crashes and those that don’t drain your smartphone battery – will be ranked higher than apps with bugs and other performance issues. The goal with this new ranking algorithm is to ensure that

Hendra Kwik is hoping to tap into the excitement of on-demand companies like Uber and distributed workforces — except instead of ridesharing, he’s hoping it will work for banking. That’s the theory behind PAYFAZZ, which coordinates with banks to create a distributed network of bank agents that can operate from wherever — even their own